Engine In

Bit of a milestone this one, but the engine is finally in. It's been mostly in for a since December, so just under six months later and job done.

Not to get too excited of course, it's just in place, it's not running yet, lots to be done before that can happen.

So why so long?

Well... there are six engine mounts, two at the bottom which go all the way through the engine block, and four at the top that just bolt into the chassis, two each side of the engine.

Back in December, Paul and I wrestled the bottom two mounts into place just to get it roughly there. This was the easiest way as it would allow us to pivot the engine then to line the others up. The two bottom mounts were VERY tight and it took a lot of careful manoeuvring (aka hitting shit with hammers) for them to fit. 

We then lined up the other four mounts with the holes and found that they didn't exactly line up, I could partly get one of the bolts in...

Can't. Quite. Fit. If only.Could. Just...

And that's where it stayed until today.

I'd decided that making the holes bigger was going to be a pain, so I'd been doing other things, but really, I need it sorting, so after various thoughts on how to do it I had a 2 min chat with Mike at work. A few mins later Mike appeared with his Dremel.

So I set about expanding the holes and boy did sparks fly. Now I don't own any safety goggles so I wore my MX helmet as that has some goggles with it (I could have just taken the googles off, but they they'd have needed adjusting to fit without the helmet, that all sounded like effort so I just wore the damn helmet).

A few minutes hours later and all four mounts were in. The spacers that were provided with the kit don't quite fit, so I'll need to mod them, and because of that the Hayabusa engine mounts aren't quite the best length, so I'll need some washers and some different length mounts, but all in all, a good job done. 

Not sure now why I put it off 6 months! Which reminds me, I know a good joke about procrastinating, but I'll tell you that later...